PRESENTATION:Thomas Demand

Thomas Demand’s work investigates the persistence of images and their ability to embed themselves in a society’s collective memory. Presenting a solo exhibition that introduces seventeen new photographs, the artist deepens his lifelong inquiry into physical form and conceptual representation. By constructing intricate paper environments sourced from news archives, historical events, and design collections, only to destroy the physical models after photographing them, Demand continuously destabilizes the boundary between the original object and its photographic reproduction.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive

In this solo exhibition featuring seventeen new photographs, Thomas Demand’s work investigates the persistence of images and their ability to embed themselves in a society’s collective memory. He studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught a generation of German photographers, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand often makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to meticulously reconstruct images taken from various media sources, often well-known historical pictures or widely seen photographs from the news. Once he has photographed his re-created environments—always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity—he destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original.

Demand is widely recognized for these meticulous studio reconstructions of everyday scenes and media culture, but in 2011 he broadened his scope by launching the “Model Series.” In this body of work, he began photographing architectural and design models created by figures such as John Lautner, Gio Ponti, and Hans Hollein, as well as the fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa. Rather than constructing the models himself, Demand focused on the physical tools of another creator’s thought process. In the artist’s own words: “It’s the sculptural presence, and the traces of someone’s practice, of understanding and remodeling, which raised my attention.”

In Demand’s newest works, the artist has photographed 18th and 19th century models for opera and ballet sets in museum collections in Vienna, Monaco, and Munich. Using a periscope to navigate these delicate labyrinths of miniature scenography, Demand animates the handmade paper maquettes with stunning arrays of light and shadow, highlighting the dramatic, dreamlike landscapes of the stage sets originally made for Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and Rossini’s “Guillaume Tell” operas, and Peter Ludwig Hertel’s ballets.

Alongside these new photographs from the artist’s “Model Series”, the exhibition also features several recent photographs of Demand’s own compositions, which illustrate quotidian scenes, such as an overcrowded bookshelf or reeds reflecting on the surface of a pond. These new images are printed directly onto copper, a technique inspired by copper’s art historical resonances ranging from Renaissance painting to early printmaking practices. The luminous metallic substrate imbues these quiet, everyday compositions with a striking material presence, offering a poignant counterpoint to the fragile, ephemeral paper structures that define Demand’s vision.

Photo: Thomas Demand, Parsifal V, 2026, Pigment print, 39⅜ x 59 inches; 100 x 150 cm, © Thomas Demand, Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 North Orange Grove & 7818 Santa Monica Boulevardm Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 19/9-7/11/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com/